But it’s important to note it’s not the acquisition that’s changing the world – it’s the people that fuel both companies. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn’t appear in our financial statements: our people. That’s their highest priority – creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.

…and while thinking about the merger and the products involved, what about ZFS…?

What they mean:
“…fuel is expensive, we have 30K units, cut it by 10K units…”

Sadly, I’m not kidding, those are the figures analysts are already expectorating.

As far as the duplicates perishing, that can take a long time. Rather than actually being killed, they will be gutted for any intellectual property (which is a good thing, think of the tech that came from Rdb), and declared stable. Such a product is pure profit (in a narrow economic definition, as well as what people normally think of as profit), as well as allowing an accounting loss to be shown. (This can be seen in the publicly available 10-K forms, for example, see the setaside amounts of like a $billion for peoplesoft and so forth, for future lifetime “support”).